Service Orientation in Holonic and Multi-agent Manufacturing

321 Pages·2015·10.21 MB·English

by  Theodor Borangiu

Studies in Computational Intelligence 594
Theodor Borangiu
André Thomas
Damien Trentesaux E ditors
Service Orientation
in Holonic and Multi-
agent Manufacturing
Studies in Computational Intelligence
Volume 594
Series editor
Janusz Kacprzyk, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
e-mail: [email protected]
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Theodor Borangiu · André Thomas
Damien Trentesaux
Editors
Service Orientation
in Holonic and Multi-agent
Manufacturing
1 3
Editors
Theodor Borangiu Damien Trentesaux
Department of Automatic Control LAMIH UMR CNRS 8201
and Applied Informatics University of Valenciennes
University Politehnica of Bucharest and Hainaut-Cambrésis (UVHC)
Bucharest Valenciennes
Romania France
André Thomas
Research Centre for Automatic Control
Nancy University
Epinal
France
ISSN 1860-949X ISSN 1860-9503 (electronic)
Studies in Computational Intelligence
ISBN 978-3-319-15158-8 ISBN 978-3-319-15159-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-15159-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014960343
Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London
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Foreword
Twenty three years ago when I was working at BHP Co. Ltd. running an
automation and control research programme in the steel industry, I was
presented with the opportunity to become involved in the newly formed Holonic
Manufacturing Systems consortium. It was one of the six consortia being formed
under the umbrella of the global Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS)
programme. After an initial glance, I prepared to discard the request. The steel
industry at that time (and ever since) was in cost-cutting mode, our research
was very short term in focus. I needed sponsorship for such an endeavour
from our steelwork operations and I simply could not envisage convincing
any of my industrial control colleagues to become involved. However, I
dutifully bundled off some documentation and sent it to our Newcastle and
Port Kembla steelworks noting that such developments might help BHP Steel
manage some of the rapid market changes that it often faced. The response
was surprising. I received an emphatic “Yes” from both steelworks who cited
examples of production delays, lack of flexibility, lost market opportunities,
etc., which they believed could be attributed to excessive rigidity of the
production control systems we used. This was deep in the age of Computer
Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) where computer control architectures were
prescriptive, hierarchically structured and where command-control to ensure
smooth operations overrode the need to flexibly adapt. I was particularly told
of a lost opportunity within the steel plate operations to meet a market need for
a thinner plate than we usually produced. Mechanically, it had been a relatively
easy opportunity to adapt the plate rolling mill to execute the additional rolling
passes to achieve the new thickness and to determine the changed spray cooling
conditions to achieve the correct metallurgy. But it took almost 6 months to
be confident that the mills planning, scheduling and control systems could be
successfully adjusted. By this time the market opportunity had disappeared.
So into Holonic Manufacturing we went. It literally changed my working life.
It took a long time to take root that the main challenges for industrial control were
not generally to do with machine control—my previous area—nor generally with
offline planning and scheduling but rather in the mushy zone in between where
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vi Foreword
the execution of orders takes place, where material flow has to be controlled and
at the same time operations on that material accurately managed. It was also the
era when Statistical Process Control (SPC) gained a strong foothold—but only for
the monitoring and control of steady operations in steady-state—and in the steel
industry as we sought to adjust to changing customer needs—there were more
start-ups, change overs and shut downs than ever before.
And when I moved to Cambridge in 1995 I could see that these challenges were
widespread across many manufacturing sectors. So the notions of managing manu-
facturing execution operations under disruptive or changing conditions became a
focus and holonic manufacturing and the multi-agent-based control stood out as
providing a guiding light as a way of enabling machines to “think for themselves”
under changing conditions. Sometime in the mid-1990s people began to wonder
whether the product being made might also benefit from thinking for themselves
and the seeds of product intelligence emerged. Elsewhere, over the next years,
other bio-inspired paradigms were also proposed, and developments in Internet,
multi-agent software, flexible logic controllers, radio frequency tagging and real-
time data management helped to provide a more convenient platform for develop-
ing these solutions.
So in 2014 it was interesting to reflect on the expansion and diversion of this
domain. This volume based on the SOHOMA 2014 Workshop provides an excel-
lent snapshot on the current state of work in this area—albeit from a predomi-
nantly European perspective. As the editors indicate in their Preface, this book is
able to update the reader on a range of developments ranging from distributed AI,
the influence of complexity and big data on this domain and extends from manu-
facturing to consider closely related logistics issues. It will be a very useful addi-
tion to your bookshelf!
December 2014 Duncan McFarlane
Preface
This volume gathers the peer-reviewed papers which were presented at the fourth
edition of the International Workshop “Service Orientation in Holonic and Multi-
agent Manufacturing—SOHOMA’14” organized on November 5–6, 2014 by the
University of Lorraine, France in collaboration with the CIMR Research Centre
in Computer Integrated Manufacturing and Robotics of the University Politehnica
of Bucharest and the TEMPO Laboratory of the University of Valenciennes and
Hainaut-Cambrésis.
SOHOMA scientific events have been organised since 2011 in the framework
of the European project no. 264207 ERRIC, managed by the faculty of Automatic
Control and Computer Science within the University Politehnica of Bucharest.
The book is structured in six parts, each one grouping a number of chapters
covering a specific research line which represents a trend in future manufacturing con-
trol: Part I: Holonic and Agent-based Industrial Automation Systems, Part II: Service-
oriented Management and Control of Manufacturing Systems, Part III: Distributed
Modelling for Safety and Security in Industrial Systems, Part IV: Complexity, Big
Data and Virtualization in Computing-oriented Manufacturing, Part V: Adaptive,
Bio-inspired and Self-organizing Multi-Agent Systems for Manufacturing and Part
VI: Physical Internet Simulation, Modelling and Control.
These six evolution lines have in common concepts related to service orienta-
tion and enterprise integration, with distributed intelligence for activities planning
and control in holonic and agent-based industrial environment; today it is gener-
ally recognized that the Service-Oriented Enterprise Architecture paradigm has
been looked upon as a suitable and effective approach for industrial automation
and manufacturing management and control.
Manufacturing systems are amongst the most complex and demanding arte-
facts in modern society but also amongst the most valuable ones. The challenges
include coping with their heterogeneous nature and their online interactive nature
in combination with competitive pressures. Offline plans are known to become
invalid soon after arriving in the shop floor. Therefore, researchers are looking into
matching technologies which are able to answer these challenges. Holonic systems
are, actually by definition, targeting such challenges. Agent technologies focus on
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viii Preface
interactive and decentralized aspects. In particular, developments aim to deliver
open systems and system components, as well as infrastructure and infrastructural
components rather than closed systems.
Technological advances in wireless sensor networks are enabling new levels
of distributed intelligence in several forms such as active products that interact
with the working environment and smart metering for monitoring the history of
products over their entire life cycle and the status and performances of resources.
These distributed intelligences offer new opportunities for reducing myopic deci-
sion-making in manufacturing control systems, thereby potentially enhancing their
sustainability. Control architectures switch their modes of operation to adapt to
severe disruptions. Manufacturing sustainability is addressed in this special issue
with respect to: fault-tolerance to resource and communication breakdown; energy
efficiency at resource and shop floor level; balancing resource usage; cost effi-
ciency and inline quality control of products. Innovative services will be growth
enablers and drivers of next generation manufacturing enterprises that are com-
petitive and sustainable.
Several frameworks are proposed for classifying, analysing initiatives and
potentially developing distributed intelligent automation systems. These frame-
works will be referred to in the book as Distributed Intelligent Automation
Systems. In particular, there is interest in systems in which the planning or exe-
cution of tasks normally associated with a centralized operational level are reas-
signed to be carried out instead by a number of units cooperating at various levels.
Or conversely, a task traditionally using information from a single source should
be able, in a distributed information system, to make use of data spread across a
range of operations—and potentially a range of organizations (the case of net-
worked, virtual enterprises).
The book defines and explains ways to implement intelligent products by put-
ting intelligence at the object (Intelligent Embedded Systems) or through the com-
puting network (using Automatic Identification and Data Capture technology at
the product to allow it to be identified and tracked, and take decisions in a com-
puting architecture). These technologies enable the automated identification of
objects, the collection of data about them and the storage of that data directly into
computer systems.
The service-oriented multi-agent systems (SoMAS) approach discussed in the
book is characterized by the use of a set of distributed autonomous and cooperative
agents (embedded in smart control components) that use the SOA principles, i.e.
oriented by the offer and request of services, in order to fulfil industrial and pro-
duction system goals. This approach is different from the traditional Multi-agent
Systems (MAS) mainly because agents are service-oriented, i.e. individual goals of
agents may be complemented by services provided by other agents, and the internal
functionalities of agents can be offered as services to other agents (these service-
oriented agents not only share services as their major form of communication, but
also complement their own goals with different types of external provided services).
Special attention is paid in the book to the framework for manufacturing inte-
gration, which matches plant floor solutions with business systems and suppliers.
Preface ix
This solution focuses on achieving flexibility by enabling a low coupling design of
the entire enterprise system through leveraging of Service-Oriented Architecture
(SOA), Cloud computing and Manufacturing Service Bus (MSB) as best practices.
The Manufacturing Service Bus (MSB) integration model described in some
papers is an adaptation of ESB for manufacturing enterprises and introduces the
concept of bus communication for the manufacturing systems. The MSB acts as an
intermediary for the data flows, assuring loose coupling between modules at shop
floor level.
The book offers a new integrated vision combining complementary emergent
technologies which allow reaching control structures with distributed intelli-
gence supporting enterprise integration (vertically and horizontally) and running
in truly distributed and ubiquitous environments. Additionally, the enrichment of
distributed systems with biology-inspired mechanisms supports dynamic structure
reconfiguration, thus handling more effectively condition changes and unexpected
disturbances, and minimizing their effects. As an example, the integration of ser-
vice-oriented principles with multi-agent frameworks allows combining the best
of the two worlds, and to overcome some limitations associated to MAS, such as
interoperability.
A brief description of the book chapters follows.
Part I reports recent advances and ongoing research in Holonic and Agent-
based Industrial Automation Systems. Nowadays, industries are seeking for
models and methods that are not only able to provide efficient overall produc-
tion performance, but also reactive, facing a growing set of unpredicted events.
One important research activity in the field focuses on holonic/multi-agent con-
trol systems that integrate predictive/proactive and reactive mechanisms into
agents/holons. The demand for large-scale systems running in complex and even
chaotic environments requires the consideration of new paradigms and technolo-
gies that provide flexibility, robustness, agility and responsiveness. Holonic sys-
tems are, actually by definition, targeting challenges that include coping with
the heterogeneous nature of industrial systems and their online interactive nature
in combination with competitive pressures. Multi-agent systems is a suitable
approach to address these challenges by offering an alternative way to design
control systems, based on the decentralization of control functions over distrib-
uted autonomous and cooperative entities. Some chapters discuss the concept of
Intelligent Product and related techniques for Product-driven Automation.
Part II groups papers analysing Service-oriented Management and Control of
Manufacturing Systems. Service orientation is emerging at multiple organizational
levels in enterprise business, and leverages technology in response to the grow-
ing need for greater business integration, flexibility and agility of manufacturing
enterprises. Closely related to the IT infrastructure of Web services, the service-
oriented enterprise architecture represents a technical architecture, a business
modelling concept, an integration source and a new way of viewing units of con-
trol within the enterprise. Business and process information systems’ integration
and interoperability are feasible by considering the customized product as “active
controller” of the enterprise resources—thus providing consistency between